One bright spot of these otherwise dreary times is the civic-mindedness animating many communities. Volunteers have signed up and formed groups in droves to help other people.
Yet such aid isn’t free of risks. Given the scarcity of protective equipment like masks, it’s important not to use up valuable items needed by health workers. This is one reason that many medical students in the US, for instance, are volunteering in non-medical roles, such as pet sitting and childcare.
Helping without harming is the main emphasis of StudentsAgainstCorona, one of the nonprofit organizations that have sprung up during the crisis. “The new initiatives don’t focus so much on the hygiene part. They focus on the help part,” says cofounder Irina Filz von Reiterdank. But given the high transmissibility of coronavirus, “if you don’t do the hygiene part, you might as well not help. I mean, it’s even better if you don’t help in that case.”
Graphics from the StudentsAgainstCorona “Volunteering Hygiene Recommendation Video”
Filz von Reiterdank, a medical student at Utrecht University, started the group with her brother and their friend Craig Brown on March 17. It’s partly a personal mission for her. As we speak she’s in the car, on her way to bring groceries to her grandmother who lives in the northern part of the Netherlands. But the personal has stretched into the global. In the short time since its launch, the platform has spread to nine countries, with new hubs forming almost every day.
For the time being the number of people asking for support is dwarfed by the number of volunteers: Filz von Reiterdank estimates that there are over 1,000 students (and others) for about 100 people in need. The volunteers are working with community organizations, such as churches, to reach out to people who might benefit from medicine collection, grocery shopping, or other activities.
In Oxford, for instance, 165 volunteers have distributed about 7,000 flyers. As Filz von Reiterdank notes, it’s not enough to rely on the internet to get the word out. “A lot of elderly don’t have computers. We even had one application made from a daughter who’s living in London, and she did it for her daughter who’s living in Oxford.”
So identifying people who might benefit has been a challenge, which has to be dealt with in context-specific ways. Tansher Singh, a logistician in New Delhi, explains, “In India, the people in need are not the stereotypical people who need to get groceries bought for them. But what happened here was that our government shut down the train network. A lot of daily wage workers were not able to go back to the villages…So the biggest problem here is not itself the virus, but the fact that people cannot earn enough to eat at this point in time. So while our government is doing everything to feed them, there’s going to be a lot of hungry people. So at least at the Indian hub, we will not expect people to sign up to this because those people don’t usually have computers. So we will have to actually mobilize resources and get it to them.” As Sikhs, Singh and his mother are already used to preparing free meals for others, as part of langur (community kitchen) customs.
Far from Delhi, in California, volunteers have faced a different issue. Some health guidelines “don’t advise to use gloves because it gives a false sense of security and people often use them wrong. And also washing your hands frequently, or using hand sanitizer, works perfectly well in conducting yourself in a hygienic way,” says Filz von Reiterdank.
But in California, “it’s not really accepted. If you don’t wear gloves, you risk that people won’t interact with you. So we’ve had to talk with the community head there and see how we can still be hygienic but also conduct ourselves in a way that we will be accepted in what we do. But we don’t let go of our own hygiene standards, because obviously…if we infect people by what we do, we might as well do nothing.”
The importance of hygiene comes up again and again. One of the group’s first tasks was to create a “Volunteering Hygiene Recommendation Video” approved by healthcare experts, including the former president of the Royal College of GPs, Mayur Lakhani.
Lakhani, a family medicine specialist and the chair of the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management, a UK professional association, comments: “I welcome the StudentsAgainstCorona initiative…I applaud their careful approach and insistence on strict hygiene protocols. This virus is very contagious with a very high spread rate of 1:3 : that is, one person with COVID-19 can infect three others, and as many are asymptomatic, the risks are enormous. The one thing that is worse than no volunteers is an unhygienic volunteer.”
StudentsAgainstCorona have had to update their hygiene guidance as recommendations change – for instance, from maintaining 1.5 meters of distance to 2 meters.
Graphics from the StudentsAgainstCorona “Volunteering Hygiene Recommendation Video”
Students around the world have been finding themselves at loose ends, even if they’ve been able to transition to online learning. Filz, who was doing anatomical research before the world turned upside down, notes drily that it’s difficult to research anatomy from home. Kamiliya Akkouche, who’s studying diplomatic studies at Oxford University, has been unable to return to her home in Ottawa, Canada. She’s now involved in organizing the StudentsAgainstCorona hubs in both Oxford and Ottawa. “This is our priority for now,” says Akkouche of the current roles of herself and her fellow students, as well as the non-students who have joined them.
Lakhani believes that volunteers like these have an important role to play during the crisis. “Health services alone cannot deal with the pandemic alone. As a working doctor, I know that there so many lonely people who cannot rely on other people to support them. Only the other day, I had a call from a vulnerable couple in their 90s who are self-isolating, saying that they had no milk or bread. Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic requires a national effort and strong partnerships between health providers and public volunteers.”
